Posts tagged ‘responsibility’

The graphic of Newton’s Cradle where the balls are replaced with human icons inspired me for this blog. It has a lot to do with responsibility, literally meaning the ability to respond to your environment. Responding means you have to add Energy into something, otherwise nothing happens. You have to be responsible (able to respond) if you want Energy to flow in a certain (any) situation. This Energy will not flow automatically but needs someone who takes an initiative. The one who takes the first initiative in a situation is often a leader. So if you want to be a leader, you need to take responsibility in letting initial Energy flow into the situation you wish to get Energized. Don’t wait for others to take the initiative, unless you don’t mind being a follower. It is by this invisible stimulus of Energy that you are creating a visible world. And freely flowing Energy can easily stimulate others to become part of that flow. They might even take on some own responsibility and initiate or add their own Energy to that flow. So that it keeps flowing. In this manner, Newton’s Cradle concept can let Energy flow freely. It only needs a little compensation for the partial Energy that gets lost in making the connections (connecting the dots). How beautiful would it be if a single person would make a change with a little initial Energy that gets picked up by others who add their Energy to it, in the end leading to planetary transformation.

Like this:

Picture source here. Traditionally, ownership is a key theme in many organizations. For many Business related “problems” we often tend to think that ownership will be the way to solve them. And that is ofcourse very true. Without ownership, noone feels “responsible” and we tend to let things go. So ownership helps. But what do we often see: in larger organizations there is a natural tendency to centralize things. We tend to centralize, integrate, uniform, standardize or (out)source on several topics: processes, organizational roles, functionalities, job descriptions, tasks, components, services, ICT etc. And from efficiency point of view there seems at first sight nothing wrong with that. But it can and often will also introduce new problems. By centralizing something which before was decentralized we need to rethink the ownership problem. And centralization will seem to make certain problems less complex but that is not allways true. Sometimes we only redistribute the complexity by centralisation and move the problem into another area. The total complexity remains or might even get worse. So what should we do instead? If we want to make people responsible for something, we must design architectures that are optimized for decentralization as much as possible to the personal level. The more personal ownership can be pinpointed, the better. What do we loose by this approach? We loose some efficiency because we add redundancy. But we gain effectiveness, we reduce the total complexity (because it is now distributed) and we have also spread riscs enourmously by decentralization. So in my opinion, in a human-centrically designed distributed architecture there can be, on an overall (enterprise) level, more advantages than disadvantages. What is your opinion?